July 12, 1998

By PAULA FRIEDMAN

THE BUDDHA IN MALIBU
New and Selected Stories. By William Harrison.
University of Missouri, paper, $18.95.

illiam Harrison's spare, understated prose only heightens our sense of horror at the flagrantly decaying lives in ''The Buddha in Malibu: New and Selected Stories.'' The first of the book's three sections establishes the tone, collecting stories set in southern California and focusing on the stubbornly grandiose desires of its restless inhabitants. Magnetized by movie glamour and greed, these men and women have been drawn from all over the country, willing to scheme, lie and cheat -- and failing to see that they have become their own victims. What Harrison so aptly renders is the way their soul hunger is displaced, converted into unfulfillable appetites of the body. In a typical story, ''Yes, I've Bought a Couple of Options Myself,'' the aging but still handsome protagonist, a male escort named Cappy, goes out on a date with a beautiful ex-model. Now the president of a real-estate company called World Mansions, she hopes to use Cappy's connections in the film industry to lure a millionaire couple -- who are also interested in producing movies-- into buying some property. Like most of the protagonists in Harrison's darkly comic stories, Cappy can't resist the temptation to do his own wheeling and dealing, thrilled by the opportunity to reinvent himself: ''He was someone else now, but he didn't know who. He had a pleasant suspicion, an exciting one, that it didn't matter who or what he was, and that in this distant coastal land where so many lived -- who said this? the philosopher Cecil B. DeMille? who was it? -- change itself was the thing of great importance.''